I picked up Dambisa Moyo’s Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for Us (2012) for the sole reason that it was endorsed by legendary investor and commodities guru Jim Rogers. And it turned out to be quite an interesting read.
Dambisa Moyo is an economist from Zambia who was trained at Harvard and Oxford. She has worked at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs.
In this book, written in a Malthusian vein, Moyo delineates the commodity crunch awaiting us in the near future, and analyzes how in the race for resources, China is way out front.
China is a hungry dragon with a voracious appetite gorging on metals like copper, lead, gold, nickel, palladium and aluminium used in the frames, batteries and circuit boards of computers and mobile phones. This is in addition to the cars, light trucks and other automobiles consuming even more metals. So far as oil is concerned, China is the second largest guzzler after the United States.
Moyo makes the important point that the rest of the world is not responding fast enough to face a commodity crisis. As she puts is: “When the day of reckoning comes in the form of resource scarcity, …, who will be ready, stocked up with inventories, saved up for the rainy day? With precision, execution, and foresight, China is doing everything to be prepared for that fateful moment. But for the rest, without focus and concerted effort many hundreds of millions of people will face famine, conflict and worse.”
China prepares itself “for the fateful moment” by banking on its huge trade surplus. To attract sellers, China now funds foreign governments (providing loans and buying their bonds), underwrites schools and hospitals, and pays for infrastructure projects such as roads and railways (particularly among the poorest parts of the world). China’s economic influence on places as far-flung as the United States, Africa, Eastern Europe, Australia and South America is “incalculable”.
Some see China’s efforts as a modern day colonialism. But China’s ambition, according to Moyo, is not for dominion over a sovereign state but rather over resources. China appears wholly disinterested in assuming sovereign responsibility or shaping the social and political infrastructure of host nations.
This book warns us of the inevitable dominant position of China in this century and how it is going to affect the economic survival of the rest of us.
Dambisa Moyo is an economist from Zambia who was trained at Harvard and Oxford. She has worked at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs.
In this book, written in a Malthusian vein, Moyo delineates the commodity crunch awaiting us in the near future, and analyzes how in the race for resources, China is way out front.
China is a hungry dragon with a voracious appetite gorging on metals like copper, lead, gold, nickel, palladium and aluminium used in the frames, batteries and circuit boards of computers and mobile phones. This is in addition to the cars, light trucks and other automobiles consuming even more metals. So far as oil is concerned, China is the second largest guzzler after the United States.
Moyo makes the important point that the rest of the world is not responding fast enough to face a commodity crisis. As she puts is: “When the day of reckoning comes in the form of resource scarcity, …, who will be ready, stocked up with inventories, saved up for the rainy day? With precision, execution, and foresight, China is doing everything to be prepared for that fateful moment. But for the rest, without focus and concerted effort many hundreds of millions of people will face famine, conflict and worse.”
China prepares itself “for the fateful moment” by banking on its huge trade surplus. To attract sellers, China now funds foreign governments (providing loans and buying their bonds), underwrites schools and hospitals, and pays for infrastructure projects such as roads and railways (particularly among the poorest parts of the world). China’s economic influence on places as far-flung as the United States, Africa, Eastern Europe, Australia and South America is “incalculable”.
Some see China’s efforts as a modern day colonialism. But China’s ambition, according to Moyo, is not for dominion over a sovereign state but rather over resources. China appears wholly disinterested in assuming sovereign responsibility or shaping the social and political infrastructure of host nations.
This book warns us of the inevitable dominant position of China in this century and how it is going to affect the economic survival of the rest of us.
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